Supporting Documents

SD825.15.  Charles Dickens to Marion Ely

Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 3.

Doughty Street

Saturday Morning [?late July 1837] [1]

My Dear Miss Ely.

Let me beg you if you can, to excuse my apparent neglect in not sending Paracelsus before. It looks very bad I know, but I had not forgotten it for an instant.

I return it now, and am happy to have the opportunity of again wishing you a pleasant voyage and a happy six weeks’ stay in Paris; above all, let me entreat you not to be so happy as to forget to return in good and reasonable time.

Believe me Ever

Most faithfully yours

Charles Dickens.

Miss Ely.

Publication: The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. M. House, G. Storey, et al. (Oxford, 1965–2002), 12, 558 (in part).

Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.

1. Dickens moved to Doughty Street on 25 March 1837. Dickens and Browning probably met on 26 June 1837, in Macready’s dressing-room. The handwriting suggests that it dates from about the same period, and certainly before February 1838, based on Dickens’s handwriting. Marion Ely was Rachel Talfourd’s niece and lived with the Talfourds.

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